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At the bottom of my street every Monday, on the nursery school drive, a phalanx of ragged beggars rummage through green wheelie bins outside a Tudor-style housing complex. I slow down at the stop sign and press the requisite button on the car’s console. Bent at the hips, African men rummage for calories and chucked-out crap to add to their swag before the garbage truck arrives. The guy with the dark-glasses is a pro. You see him everywhere, neat and bustling. Most of the others come from the children’s park they’ve taken over. It’s hand to mouth for them and whoonga in between. Like a conjurer, a young man finesses an improbably long pole from the bin. Rationally, it’s hard to begrudge them their messy survival. One or two, though, fail to avert their eyes. Like the one producing the wooden pole. He hears the locks knocking shut. This offal is not enough. I’m pretty …

As Egypt lurches towards democracy, South Africa lurches within it. A comparison between the two countries’ very different struggles. (in Africa Report) 09 February 2011 As a student of revolt I sat transfixed this week before television and computer screens, imbibing a riot of Egyptian coverage. In Cairo, Alexandria and Suez hundreds of thousands – first the youth, then older folk, Islamists and secularists, middle-class and poor people – poured onto the streets, into the face of beatings, bullets and tanks. They were there to reject resoundingly the rule of their dictatorial president, Hosni Mubarak. These were unprecedented scenes in a country governed with a granite fist for 30 years by a pharaonic ruler. The Mubarak decades were an era of growth for the elite and stability for the loyal. For the rest, the costs were high. The domestic opposition was crushed, personal liberties whisked away in unmarked cars, corruption not only entrenched but flaunted, and all …